Artist pays homage to vast beauty of Bears Ears

||||Photo by Charlotte Fife-Jepperson||||

By Charlotte Fife-Jepperson

When President Trump came to Utah on Dec. 4 to announce the drastic shrinking of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments, he took a quick tour of Welfare Square on Salt Lake City’s west side.

On the way to the state capitol building, President Trump’s motorcade very well may have driven by a large public mural of the former Bears Ears National Monument painted on the side of a building on the City Fleet block at approximately 325 W. 800 South.

Over a period of nine days during late October, Artist Josh Scheuerman worked on the mural to depict the vast beauty of the Bears Ears area, which includes Indian Creek. He enlisted the help of others.

Sixteen kids from the Children’s Synergistic Learning Collaborative, a non-profit organization serving kids of all abilities, helped Scheuerman get the painting started by painting whatever they wanted on the bottom of the wall. He then later painted over it, but said, “It’s underneath there…all their love.”

The mural was painted with exterior, weather-resistant, acrylic Behr paint, with 9-inch and 4-inch rollers and a 2-inch brush, and it was dedicated by Carl Moore and other members of Pandos, a Native and environmental activist group, one week before Pres.Trump signed the two controversial proclamations shrinking the monuments and dividing them up into five smaller portions of land.

Scheuerman and fellow artist Renya Nelson hope to work with the city to create many more murals throughout the Granary District in the future.